One part about working in the Windows product group is that you end up with mostly-operational operating systems littering every machine you own. I suppose it isn't required to toss development Windows builds on machines other than test machines—but I'm a giant nerd and Windows is typically stable enough to pick any arbitrary build and use it on my primary machine. So I do.
Anyway, I've had a really early preproduction copy of Server 2008 on my primary development machine for nearly a year and although it was almost completely functional, there were a couple of bugs that kept it tremendously frustrating to use. Apps would crash every week or so, which is way more often than on a Vista RTM or SP1 build. Unfortunately, moving off of this preproduction build wasn't ever in the cards since I've been really busy and couldn't afford the day or two of downtime it takes to flatten a machine.
But I got replacement hardware a few weeks ago and the spring cleaning (and actual Vista SP1 installation) is tremendously refreshing. The new machine is significantly quicker (bonus!) and when anything does crash (it hasn't yet) I can actually debug it directly since the binary symbols will still be available long after initial installation, since I've got a fully released OS on there.
I feel so much more productive now.
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